Chapter XXIX

HISTORY OF SPECULATIVE PHILOSOPHY FROM 1650 TO 1700.

Aristotelians—Logicians—Cudworth—Sketch of the Philosophy of Gassendi—Cartesianism—Port-Royal Logic—Analysis of the Search for Truth of Malebranche, and of the Ethics of Spinosa—Glanvil—Locke’s Essay on the Human Understanding.

Aristotelian metaphysics.

1. The Aristotelian and scholastic metaphysics, though shaken on every side, and especially by the rapid progress of the Cartesian theories, had not lost their hold over the theologians of the Roman church, or even the protestant universities, at the beginning of this period, and hardly at its close. Brucker enumerates several writers of that class in Germany;[754] and we find, as late as 1693, a formal injunction by the Sorbonne, that none who taught philosophy in the colleges under its jurisdiction should introduce any novelties, or swerve from the Aristotelian doctrine.[755] The Jesuits, rather unfortunately for their credit, distinguished themselves as strenuous advocates of the old philosophy, and thus lost the advantage they had obtained in philology as enemies of barbarous prejudice, and encouragers of a progressive spirit in their disciples. Rapin, one of their most accomplished men, after speaking with little respect of the Novum Organum, extols the disputations of the schools as the best method in the education of young men, who, as he fancies, have too little experience to delight in physical science.[756]

Their decline. Thomas White. 2. It is a difficult and dangerous choice, in a new state of public opinion (and we have to make it at present), between that which may itself pass away, and that which must efface what has gone before. Those who clung to the ancient philosophy believed that Bacon and Descartes were the idols of a transitory fashion, and that the wisdom of long ages would regain its ascendancy. They were deceived, and their own reputation has been swept off with the systems to which they adhered. Thomas White, an English catholic priest, whose Latin appellation is Albius, endeavoured to maintain the Aristotelian metaphysics and the scholastic terminology in several works, and especially in an attack upon Glanvil’s Vanity of Dogmatizing. This book, entitled Sciri, I know only through Glanvil’s reply in his second edition, by which White appears to be a mere Aristotelian. He was a friend of Sir Kenelm Digby, who was himself, though a man of considerable talents, incapable of disentangling his mind from the Peripatetic hypotheses. The power of words indeed is so great, the illusions of what is called realism, or of believing that general terms have an objective exterior being, are so natural, and especially so bound up both with our notions of essential, especially theological, truth, and with our popular language, that no man could in that age be much censured for not casting off his fetters, even when he had heard the call to liberty from some modern voices. We find that even after two centuries of a better method, many are always ready to fall back into a verbal process of theorising.

Logic. 3. Logic was taught in the Aristotelian method, or rather in one which, with some change for the worse, had been gradually founded upon it. Burgersdicius, in this and in other sciences, seems to have been in repute; Smiglecius also is mentioned with praise.[757] These lived both in the former part of the century. But they were superceded, at least in England, by Wallis, whose Institutio Logicæ ad Communes Usus Accommodata was published in 1687. He claims as an improvement upon the received system, the classifying singular propositions among universals.[758] Ramus had made a third class of them, and in this he seems to have been generally followed. Aristotle, though it does not appear that he is explicit on the subject, does not rank them as particular. That Wallis is right cannot be doubted by anyone who reflects at all; but his originality we must not assert. The same had been perceived by the authors of the Port-Royal Logic; a work to which he has made no allusion.[759] Wallis claims also as his own the method of reducing hypothetical to categorical syllogisms, and proves it elaborately in a separate dissertation. A smaller treatise, still much used at Oxford, by Aldrich, Compendium Artis Logicæ, 1691, is clear and concise, but seems to contain nothing very important; and he alludes to the Art de Penser in a tone of insolence, which must rouse indignation in those who are acquainted with that excellent work. Aldrich’s censures are, in many instances, mere cavil and misrepresentation; I do not know that they are right in any.[760] Of the Art de Penser itself we shall have something to say in the course of this chapter.

Stanley’s History of Philosophy. 4. Before we proceed to those whose philosophy may be reckoned original or at least modern, a very few deserve mention who have endeavoured to maintain or restore that of antiquity. Stanley’s History of Philosophy, in 1655, is in great measure confined to biography, and comprehends no name later than Carneades. Most is derived from Diogenes Laertius; but an analysis of the Platonic philosophy is given from Alcinous, and the author has compiled one of the Peripatetic system from Aristotle himself. The doctrine of the Stoics is also elaborately deduced from various sources. Stanley on the whole brought a good deal from an almost untrodden field; but he is merely a historian, and never a critic of philosophy. He does not mention Epicurus at all, probably because Gassendi had so well written that philosopher’s life.

Gale’s Court of Gentiles. 5. Gale’s Court of the Gentiles, partly in 1669 and partly in later years, is incomparably a more learned work, than that of Stanley. Its aim is to prove that all heathen philosophy, whether barbaric or Greek, was borrowed from the Scriptures, or at least from the Jews. The first part is entitled Of Philology, which traces the same leading principle by means of language; the second, Of Philosophy: the third treats of the Vanity of Philosophy, and the fourth of Reformed Philosophy, “wherein Plato’s moral and metaphysic or prime philosophy is reduced to an useful form and method.” Gale has been reckoned among Platonic philosophers, and indeed he professes to find a great resemblance between the philosophy of Plato and his own. But he is a determined Calvinist in all respects, and scruples not to say, “Whatever God wills is just, because he wills it;” and again, “God willeth nothing without himself because it is just, but it is therefore just because he willeth it. The reasons of good and evil extrinsic to the divine essence are all dependent on the divine will, either decernent or legislative.”[761] It is not likely that Plato would have acknowledged such a disciple.

Cudworth’s Intellectual System. 6. A much more eminent and enlightened man than Gale, Ralph Cudworth, by his Intellectual System of the Universe, published in 1678, but written several years before, placed himself in a middle point between the declining and rising schools of philosophy; more independent of authority, and more close, perhaps, in argument than the former, but more prodigal of learning, more technical in language, and less conversant with analytical and inductive processes of reasoning than the latter. Upon the whole, however, he belongs to the school of antiquity, and probably his wish was to be classed with it. Cudworth was one of those whom Hobbes had roused by the atheistic and immoral theories of the Leviathan; nor did any antagonist perhaps of that philosopher bring a more vigorous understanding to the combat. This understanding was not so much obstructed in its own exercise by a vast erudition, as it was sometimes concealed by it from the reader. Cudworth has passed more for a recorder of ancient philosophy, than for one who might stand in a respectable class among philosophers; and his work, though long, being unfinished, as well as full of digression, its object has not been fully apprehended.

Its object. 7. This object was to establish the liberty of human actions against the fatalists. Of these he lays it down that there are three kinds, the first atheistic; the second admitting a Deity, but one acting necessarily and without moral perfections; the third granting the moral attributes of God, but asserting all human actions to be governed by necessary laws which he has ordained. The first book of the Intellectual System, which alone is extant, relates wholly to the proofs of the existence of a Deity against the atheistic fatalists, his moral nature being rarely or never touched; so that the greater and more interesting part of the work, for the sake of which the author projected it, was never written, unless we take for fragments of it some writings of the author preserved in the British Museum.

Sketch of it. 8. The first chapter contains an account of the ancient corpuscular philosophy, which, till corrupted by Leucippus and Democritus, Cudworth takes to have been not only theistic, but more consonant to theistic principles than any other. These two, however, brought in a fatalism grounded on their own atomic theory. In the second chapter he states very fully and fairly all their arguments, or rather all that have ever been adduced on the atheistic side. In the third he expatiates on the hylozoic atheism, as he calls it, of Strato, which accounts the world to be animated in all its parts but without a single controlling intelligence, and adverts to another hypothesis, which gives a vegetable but not sentient life to the world.

His plastic nature. 9. This leads Cudworth to his own famous theory of a plastic nature, a device to account for the operations of physical laws without the continued agency of the Deity. Of this plastic energy he speaks in rather a confused and indefinite manner giving it in one place a sort of sentient life, or what he calls “a drowsy unawakened cogitation,” and always treating it as an entity or real being. This language of Cudworth, and indeed the whole hypothesis of a plastic nature, was unable to stand the searching eye of Bayle, who, in an article of his dictionary, pointed out its unphilosophical and dangerous assumptions. Le Clerc endeavoured to support Cudworth against Bayle, but with little success.[762] It has had, however, some partizans, though rather among physiologists than metaphysicians. Grew adopted it to explain vegetation; and the plastic nature differs only, as I conceive, from what Hunter and Abernethy have called life in organised bodies by its more extensive agency; for if we are to believe that there is a vital power, not a mere name for the sequence of phenomena, which marshals the molecules of animal and vegetable substance, we can see no reason why a similar energy should not determine other molecules to assume geometrical figures in crystallization. The error or paradox consists in assigning a real unity of existence, and a real power of causation, to that which is unintelligent.

His account of old philosophy. 10. The fourth chapter of the Intellectual System, of vast length, and occupying half the entire work, launches into a sea of old philosophy, in order to show the unity of a supreme God to have been a general belief of antiquity. “In this fourth chapter,” he says “we were necessitated by the matter itself to run out into philology and antiquity, as also in the other parts of the book we do often give an account of the doctrine of the ancients; which, however, some over-severe philosophers may look upon fastidiously or undervalue and depreciate, yet as we conceived it often necessary, so possibly may the variety thereof not be ungrateful to others, and this mixture of philology throughout the whole sweeten and allay the severity of philosophy to them; the main thing which the book pretends to, in the meantime, being the philosophy of religion. But for our part, we neither call philology, nor yet philosophy, our mistress, but serve ourselves of either as occasion requireth.”[763]

11. The whole fourth chapter may be reckoned one great episode, and as it contains a store of useful knowledge on ancient philosophy, it has not only been more read than the remaining part of the Intellectual System, but has been the cause, in more than one respect, that the work has been erroneously judged. Thus, Cudworth has been reckoned, by very respectable authorities, in the Platonic school of philosophers, and even in that of the later Platonists; for which I perceive little other reason than that he has gone diffusely into a supposed resemblance between the Platonic and Christian Trinity. Whether we agree with him in this or no, the subject is insulated, and belongs only to the history of theological opinion; in Cudworth’s own philosophy he appears to be an eclectic, not the vassal of Plato, Plotinus, or Aristotle, though deeply versed in them all.

His arguments against atheism. 12. In the fifth and last chapter of the first and only book of the Intellectual System, Cudworth, reverting to the various atheistical arguments which he had stated in the second chapter, answers them at great length, and though not without much erudition, perhaps more than was requisite, yet depending chiefly on his own stores of reasoning. And inasmuch as even a second-rate philosopher ranks higher in literary precedence than the most learned reporter of other men’s doctrine, it may be unfortunate for Cudworth’s reputation that he consumed so much time in the preceding chapter upon mere learning, even though that should be reckoned more useful and valuable than his own reasonings. These, however, are frequently valuable, and, as I have intimated above, he is partially tinctured by the philosophy of his own generation, while he endeavours to tread in the ancient paths. Yet he seems not aware of the place which Bacon, Descartes, and Gassendi were to hold; and not only names them sometimes with censure, hardly with praise, but most inexcusably throws out several intimations that they had designedly served the cause of atheism. The disposition of the two former to slight the argument from final causes, though it might justly be animadverted upon, could not warrant this most uncandid and untrue aspersion. But justice was even-handed; Cudworth himself did not escape the slander of bigots; it was idly said by Dryden, that he had put the arguments against a Deity so well, that some thought he had not answered them, and if Warburton may be believed, the remaining part of the Intellectual System was never published, on account of the world’s malignity in judging of the first.[764] Probably it was never written.

13. Cudworth is too credulous and uncritical about ancient writings, defending all as genuine, even where his own age had been sceptical. His terminology is stiff and pedantic, as is the case with all our older metaphysicians, abounding in words, which the English language has not recognised. He is full of the ancients, but rarely quotes the schoolmen. Hobbes is the adversary with whom he most grapples; the materialism, the resolving all ideas into sensation, the low morality of that writer, were obnoxious to the animadversion of so strenuous an advocate of a more elevated philosophy. In some respects, Cudworth has, as I conceive, much the advantage; in others, he will generally be thought by our metaphysicians to want precision and logical reasoning; and, upon the whole, we must rank him, in philosophical acumen, far below Hobbes, Malebranche, and Locke, but also far above any mere Aristotelians, or retailers of Scotus and Aquinas.

More. 14. Henry More, though by no means less eminent than Cudworth in his own age, ought not to be placed on the same level. More fell not only into the mystical notions of the later Platonists, but even of the Cabbalistic writers. His metaphysical philosophy was borrowed in great measure from them; and though he was in correspondence with Descartes, and enchanted with the new views that opened upon him, yet we find that he was reckoned much less of a Cartesian afterwards, and even wrote against parts of the theory.[765] The most peculiar tenet of More was the extension of spirit; acknowledging and even striving for the souls’ immateriality, he still could not conceive it to be unextended. Yet it seems evident that if we give extension as well as figure, which is implied in finite extension, to the single self-conscious monad, qualities as heterogeneous to thinking as material impenetrability itself, we shall find it in vain to deny the possibility at least of the latter. Some, indeed, might question whether what we call matter is any real being at all, except as extension under peculiar conditions. But this conjecture need not here be pressed.

Gassendi. 15. Gassendi himself, by the extensiveness of his erudition, may be said to have united the two schools of speculative philosophy, the historical and the experimental, though the character of his mind determined him far more towards the latter. He belongs in point of time rather to the earlier period of the century; but his Syntagma Philosophicum having been published in 1658, we have deferred the review of it for this volume. This posthumous work, in two volumes folio, and nearly 1600 pages closely printed in double columns, is divided into three parts, the Logic, the Physics, and the Ethics; the second occupying more than five-sixths of the whole. |His Logic.| The Logic is introduced by two proœmial books; one containing a history of the science from Zeno of Elea, the parent of systematic logic, to Bacon and Descartes;[766] the other, still more valuable, on the criteria of truth; shortly criticising also, in a chapter of this book, the several schemes of logic which he had merely described in the former. After stating very prolixly, as is usual with him, the arguments of the sceptics against the evidence of the senses, and those of the dogmatics, as he calls them, who refer the sole criterion of truth to the understanding, he propounds a sort of middle course. It is necessary, he observes, before we can infer truth, that there should be some sensible sign, αισθητον σημειον; for, since all the knowledge we possess is derived from the sense, the mind must first have some sensible image, by which it may be led to a knowledge of what is latent and not perceived by sense. Hence, we may distinguish in ourselves a double criterion; one by which we perceive the sign—namely, the senses; another, by which we understand through reasoning the latent thing—namely, the intellect or rational faculty.[767] This he illustrates by the pores of the skin, which we do not perceive, but infer their existence by observing the permeation of moisture.

Logica Verulamii, Gassendi says in another place, tota ac per se ad physicam, atque adeo ad veritatem notitiamve rerum germanam habendam contendit. Præcipuè autem in eo est, ut bene imaginemur, quatenus vult esse imprimis exuenda omnia præjudicia ac novas deinde notiones ideasve ex novis debitèque factis experimentis inducendas. Logica Cartesii rectè quidem Verulamii imitatione ab eo exorditur, quod ad bene imaginandum prava prejudicia exuenda, recta vero induenda vult, &c., p. 90.

His theory of ideas. 16. In the first part of the treatise itself on Logic, to which these two books are introductory, Gassendi lays down again his favourite principle, that every idea in the mind is ultimately derived from the senses. But while what the senses transmit are only singular ideas, the mind has the faculty of making general ideas out of a number of these singular ones when they resemble each other.[768] In this part of his Logic he expresses himself clearly and unequivocally a conceptualist.

17. The Physics were expanded with a prodigality of learning upon every province of nature. Gassendi is full of quotation, and his systematic method manifests the comprehensiveness of his researches. In the third book of the second part of the third section of the Physics, he treats of the immateriality, and, in the fourteenth, of the immortality of the soul, and maintains the affirmative of both propositions. This may not be what those who judge of Gassendi merely from his objections to the Meditations of Descartes have supposed. But a clearer insight into his metaphysical theory will be obtained from the ninth book of the same part of the Physics, entitled, De Intellectu, on the Human Understanding.

And of the nature of the soul. 18. In this book, after much display of erudition on the tenets of philosophers, he determines the soul to be an incorporeal substance, created by God, and infused into the body, so that it resides in it as an informing and not merely a present nature, forma informans, et non simpliciter assistens.[769] He next distinguishes intellection or understanding from imagination or perception; which is worthy of particular notice, because in his controversy with Descartes he had thrown out doubts as to any distinction between them. We have in ourselves a kind of faculty which enables us, by means of reasoning, to understand that which by no endeavours we can imagine or represent to the mind.[770] Of this the size of the sun, or innumerable other examples might be given; the mind having no idea suggested by the imagination of the sun’s magnitude, but knowing it by a peculiar process of reasoning. And hence we infer that the intellectual soul is immaterial, because it understands that which no material image presents to it, as we infer also that the imaginative faculty is material, because it employs the images supplied by sense. It is true that the intellect makes use of these sensible images, as steps towards its reasoning upon things which cannot be imagined; but the proof of its immateriality is given by this, that it passes beyond all material images, and attains a true knowledge of that whereof it has no image.

19. Buhle observes that in what Gassendi has said on the power of the mind to understand what it cannot conceive, there is a forgetfulness of his principle, that nothing is in the understanding which has not been in the sense. But, unless we impute repeated contradictions to this philosopher, he must have meant that axiom in a less extended sense than it has been taken by some who have since employed it. By that which is “in the understanding,” he could only intend definite images derived from sense, which must be present before the mind can exercise any faculty, or proceed to reason up to unimaginable things. The fallacy of the sensualist school, English and French, was to conclude that we can have no knowledge of that which is not “in the understanding;” an inference true in the popular sense of words, but false in the metaphysical.

Distinguishes ideas of reflection. 20. There is, moreover, Gassendi proceeds, a class of reflex operations, whereby the mind understands itself and its own faculties, and is conscious that it is exercising such acts. And this faculty is superior to any that a material substance possesses; for no body can act reflexly on itself, but must move from one place to another.[771] Our observation, therefore, of our own imaginings must be by a power superior to imagination itself; for imagination is employed on the image, not on the perception of the image, since there is no image of the act of perception.

21. The intellect also not only forms universal ideas, but perceives the nature of universality. And this seems peculiar to mankind; for brutes do not show anything more than a power of association by resemblance. In our own conception of an universal, it may be urged, there is always some admixture of singularity, as of a particular form, magnitude, or colour; yet we are able, Gassendi thinks, to strip the image successively of all these particular adjuncts.[772] He seems, therefore, as has been remarked above, to have held the conceptualist theory in the strictest manner, admitting the reality of universal ideas even as images present to the mind.

Also intellect from imagination. 22. Intellection being the proper operation, of the soul, it is needless to inquire whether it does this by its own nature, or by a peculiar faculty called understanding, nor should we trouble ourselves about the Aristotelian distinction of the active and passive intellect.[773] We have only to distinguish this intellection from mere conception derived from the phantasy, which is necessarily associated with it. We cannot conceive God in this life, except under some image thus supplied; and it is the same with all other incorporeal things. Nor do we comprehend infinite quantities, but have a sort of confused image of indefinite extension. This is surely a right account of the matter; and if Stewart had paid any attention to these and several other passages, he could not have so much misconceived the philosophy of Gassendi.

23. The mind, as long as it dwells in the body, seems to have no intelligible species, except phantasms derived from sense. These he takes for impressions on the brain, driven to and fro by the animal spirits till they reach the phantasia, or imaginative faculty, and cause it to imagine sensible things. The soul, in Gassendi’s theory, consists of an incorporeal part or intellect, and of a corporeal part, the phantasy or sensitive soul, which he conceives to be diffused throughout the body. The intellectual soul instantly perceives, by its union with the phantasy, the images impressed upon the latter, not by impulse of these sensible and material species, but by intuition of their images in the phantasy.[774] Thus, if I rightly apprehend his meaning, we are to distinguish, first, the species in the brain, derived from immediate sense or reminiscence; secondly, the image of these conceived by the phantasy; thirdly, the act of perception in the mind itself, by which it knows the phantasy to have imagined these species, and knows also the species themselves to have, or to have had, their external archetypes. This distinction of the animus, or reasonable, from the anima, or sensitive soul, he took, as he did a great part of his philosophy, from Epicurus.

24. The phantasy and intellect proceed together, so that they might appear at first to be the same faculty. Not only, however, are they different in their operation even as to objects which fall under the senses, and are represented to the mind, but the intellect has certain operations peculiar to itself. Such is the apprehensions of things which cannot be perceived by sense, as the Deity, whom, though we can only imagine as corporeal, we apprehend or understand to be otherwise.[775] He repeats a good deal of what he had before said on the distinctive province of the understanding, by which we reason on things incapable of being imagined; drawing several instances from the geometry of infinites, as in asymptotes, wherein, he says, something is always inferred by reasoning which we presume to be true, and yet cannot reach by any effort of imagination.[776]

His philosophy misunderstood by Stewart. 25. I have given a few extracts from Gassendi, in order to confirm what has been said, his writings being little read in England, and his philosophy not having been always represented in the same manner. De Gérando has claimed, on two occasions, the priority for Gassendi in that theory of the generation of ideas which has usually been ascribed to Locke.[777] But Stewart protests against this alledged similarity in the tenets of the French and English philosophers. “The remark,” he says, “is certainly just, if restrained to Locke’s doctrine as interpreted by the greater part of philosophers on the continent; but it is very wide of the truth, if applied to it as now explained and modified by the most intelligent of his disciples in this country. The main scope, indeed, of Gassendi’s argument against Descartes is to materialise that class of our ideas which the Lockists, as well as the Cartesians, consider as the exclusive objects of the power of reflection, and to show that these ideas are all ultimately resolvable into images or conceptions borrowed from things external. It is not, therefore, what is sound and valuable in this part of Locke’s system, but the errors grafted on it in the comments of some of his followers, that can justly be said to have been borrowed from Gassendi. Nor has Gassendi the merit of originality even in these errors; for scarcely a remark on the subject occurs in his works, but what is copied from the accounts transmitted to us of the Epicurean metaphysics.”[778]

26. It will probably appear to those who consider what I have quoted from Gassendi, that in his latest writings he did not differ so much from Locke, and lead the way so much to the school of the French metaphysicians of the eighteenth century as Stewart has supposed. The resemblance to the Essay on the Human Understanding, in several points, especially in the important distinction of what Locke has called ideas of reflection from those of sense, is too evident to be denied. I am at the same time unable to account in a satisfactory manner for the apparent discrepancy between the language of Gassendi in the Syntagma Philosophicum, and that which we find in his objections to the Meditations of Descartes. No great interval of time had intervened between the two works; for the correspondence with Descartes bears date in 1641, and it appears by that with Louis, Count of Angoulême, in the succeeding year, that he was already employed on the first part of the Syntagma Philosophicum.[779] Whether he urged some of his objections against the Cartesian metaphysics with a regard to victory rather than truth, or, as would be the more candid, and perhaps more reasonable hypothesis, he was induced by the acuteness of his great antagonist, to review and reform his own opinions, I must leave to the philosophical reader.[780]

Bernier’s epitome of Gassendi. 27. Stewart had evidently little or no knowledge of the Syntagma Philosophicum. But he had seen an Abridgment of the Philosophy of Gassendi by Bernier, published at Lyons in 1678, and finding in this the doctrine of Locke on ideas of reflection, conceived that it did not faithfully represent its own original. But this was hardly a very plausible conjecture; Bernier being a man of considerable ability, an intimate friend of Gassendi, and his epitome being so far from concise that it extends to eight small volumes. Having not indeed collated the two books, but read them within a short interval of time, I can say that Bernier has given a faithful account of the philosophy of Gassendi, as it is contained in the Syntagma Philosophicum, for he takes notice of no other work; nor has he here added anything of his own. But in 1682 he published another little book, entitled, Doutes de M. Bernier sur quelques uns des principaux Chapitres de son Abrégé de la Philosophie de Gassendi. One of these doubts relates to the existence of space; and in another place he denies the reality of eternity or abstract duration. Bernier observes, as Descartes had done, that it is vain and even dangerous to attempt a definition of evident things, such as motion, because we are apt to mistake a definition of the word for one of the thing; and philosophers seem to conceive that motion is a real being, when they talk of a billiard-ball communicating or losing it.[781]

Process of Cartesian philosophy. 28. The Cartesian philosophy, which its adversaries had expected to expire with its founder, spread more and more after his death, nor had it ever depended on any personal favour or popularity of Descartes, since he did not possess such except with a few friends. The churches and schools of Holland were full of Cartesians. The old scholastic philosophy became ridiculous, its distinctions, its maxims were laughed at, as its adherents complain; and probably a more fatal blow was given to the Aristotelian system by Descartes than even by Bacon. The Cartesian theories were obnoxious to the rigid class of theologians; but two parties of considerable importance in Holland, the Arminians and the Coccejans, generally espoused the new philosophy. Many speculations in theology were immediately connected with it, and it acted on the free and scrutinising spirit which began to sap the bulwarks of established orthodoxy. The Cartesians were denounced in ecclesiastical synods, and were hardly admitted to any office in the church. They were condemned by several universities, and especially by that of Leyden, in 1678, for the position that the truth of scripture must be proved by reason.[782] Nor were they less exposed to persecution in France.[783]

29. The Cartesian philosophy, in one sense, carried in itself the seeds of its own decline; it was the Scylla of many dogs; it taught men to think for themselves, and to think often better than Descartes had done. A new eclectic philosophy, or rather the genuine spirit of free inquiry, made Cartesianism cease as a sect, though it left much that had been introduced by it. We owe thanks to these Cartesians of the seventeenth century for their strenuous assertion of reason against prescriptive authority: the latter part of this age was signalised by the overthrow of a despotism which had fought every inch in its retreat, and it was manifestly after a struggle, on the continent, with this new philosophy, that it was ultimately vanquished.[784]

La Forge. Regis. 30. The Cartesian writers of France, the Low Countries, and Germany, were numerous and respectable. La Forge of Saumur first developed the theory of occasional causes to explain the union of soul and body, wherein he was followed by Geulinx, Regis, Wittich, and Malebranche.[785] But this and other innovations displeased the stricter Cartesians who did not find them in their master. Clauberg in Germany, Clerselier in France, Le Grand in the Low Countries, should be mentioned among the leaders of the school. But no one has left so comprehensive a statement and defence of Cartesianism, as Jean Silvain Regis, whose système de la Philosophie, in three quarto volumes, appeared at Paris in 1690. It is divided into four parts, on Logic, Metaphysics, Physics, and Ethics. In the three latter, Regis claims nothing as his own except some explanations, “All that I have said, being due to M. Descartes, whose method and principles I have followed, even in explanations that are different from his own.” And in his Logic he professes to have gone little beyond the author of the Art de Penser.[786] Notwithstanding this rare modesty, Regis is not a writer unworthy of being consulted by the studious of philosophy, nor deficient in clearer and fuller statements than will always be found in Descartes. It might even be said that he has many things which would be sought in vain through his master’s writings, though I am unable to prove that they might not be traced in those of the intermediate Cartesians. Though our limits will not permit any further account of Regis, I will give a few passages in a note.[787]

Every mode supposes a substance wherein it exists. From this axiom Regis deduces the objective being of space, because we have the ideas of length, breadth, and depth, which cannot belong to ourselves, our souls having none of these properties; nor could the idea be suggested by a superior being, if space did not exist, because they would be the representations of non entity, which is impossible. But this transcendental proof is too subtle for the world.

It is an axiom of Regis that we only know things without us by means of ideas, and that things of which we have no ideas, are in regard to us as if they did not exist at all. Another axiom is that all ideas, considered in respect to their representative property, depend on objects as their types, or causes exemplaires. And a third, that the “cause exemplaire” of ideas must contain all the properties which the ideas represent. These axioms, according to him, are the bases of all certainty in physical truth. From the second axiom he deduces the objectivity or “cause exemplaire” of his idea of a perfect being; and his proof seems at least more clearly put than by Descartes. Every idea implies an objective reality; for otherwise there would be an effect without a cause. In this we have the sophisms and begging of questions of which we may see many instances in Spinosa.

In the second part of the first book of his metaphysics, Regis treats of the union of soul and body, and concludes that the motions of the body only act on the soul by a special will of God, who has determined to produce certain thoughts simultaneously with certain bodily motions, p. 124. God is the efficient first cause of all effects, his creatures are but secondarily efficient. But as they act immediately, we may ascribe all model beings to the efficiency of second causes. And he prefers this expression to that of occasional causes, usual among the Cartesians, because he fancies the latter rather derogatory to the fixed will of God.

Huet’s Censure of Cartesianism. 31. Huet, bishop of Avranches, a man of more general erudition than philosophical acuteness, yet not quite without this, arraigned the whole theory in his Censura Philosophiæ Cartesianæ. He had been for many years, as he tells us, a favourer of Cartesianism, but his retractation is very complete. It cannot be denied that Huet strikes well at the vulnerable parts of the Cartesian metaphysics, and exposes their alternate scepticism and dogmatism with some justice. In other respects he displays an inferior knowledge of the human mind and of the principles of reasoning to Descartes. He repeats Gassendi’s cavil that, Cogito, ergo sum, involves the truth of Quod cogitat, est. The Cartesians, Huet observes, assert the major, or universal, to be deduced from the minor; which, though true in things known by induction, is not so in propositions necessarily known, or as the schools say, à priori, as that the whole is greater than its part. It is not, however, probable that Descartes would have extended his reply to Gassendi’s criticism so far as this; some have referred our knowledge of geometrical axioms to experience, but this seems not agreeable to the Cartesian theory.

Port-Royal Logic. 32. The influence of the Cartesian philosophy was displayed in a treatise of deserved reputation, L’Art de Penser, often called the Port-Royal Logic. It was the work of Antony Arnauld, with some assistance, perhaps, by Nicole. Arnauld was not an entire Cartesian; he had himself been engaged in controversy with Descartes; but his understanding was clear and calm, his love of truth sincere, and he could not avoid recognising the vast superiority of the new philosophy to that received in the schools. This logic accordingly is perhaps the first regular treatise on that science that contained a protestation, though in very moderate language, against the Aristotelian method. The author tells us that after some doubt he had resolved to insert a few things rather troublesome and of little value, such as the rules of conversion and the demonstration of the syllogistic figures, chiefly as exercises of the understanding, for which difficulties are not without utility. The method of syllogism itself he deems little serviceable in the discovery of truth; while many things dwelt upon in books of logic, such as the ten categories, rather injure than improve the reasoning faculties, because they accustom men to satisfy themselves with words, and to mistake a long catalogue of arbitrary definitions for real knowledge. Of Aristotle he speaks in more honourable terms than Bacon had done before, or than Malebranche did afterwards; acknowledging the extraordinary merit of some of his writings, but pointing out with an independent spirit his failings as a master in the art of reasoning.

33. The first part of L’Art de Penser is almost entirely metaphysical, in the usual sense of that word. It considers ideas in their nature and origin, in the chief differences of the objects they represent, in their simplicity of composition, in their extent, as universal, particular, or singular, and lastly in their distinctness or confusion. The word idea, it is observed, is among those which are so clear that we cannot explain them by means of others, because none can be more clear and simple than themselves.[788] But here it may be doubtful whether the sense in which the word is to be taken, must strike everyone in the same way. The clearness of a word does not depend on its association with a distinct conception in our own minds, but on the generality of this same association in the minds of others.

34. No follower of Descartes has more unambiguously than this author distinguished between imagination and intellection, though he gives the name of idea to both. Many suppose, he says, that they cannot conceive a thing when they cannot imagine it. But we cannot imagine a figure of 1,000 sides, though we can conceive it and reason upon it. We may indeed get a confused image of a figure with many sides, but these are no more 1,000 than they are 999. Thus, also, we have ideas of thinking, affirming, denying, and the like, though we have no imagination of these operations. By ideas therefore we mean not images painted in the fancy, but all that is in our minds when we say that we conceive anything, in whatever manner we may conceive it. Hence, it is easy to judge of the falsehood of some opinions held in this age. One philosopher has advanced that we have no idea of God; another that all reasoning is but an assemblage of words connected by an affirmation. He glances here at Gassendi and Hobbes.[789] Far from all our ideas coming from the senses, as the Aristotelians have said, and as Gassendi asserts in his Logic, we may say on the contrary that no idea in our minds is derived from the senses except occasionally (par occasion); that is, the movements of the brain, which is all the organs of sense can effect, give occasion to the soul to form different ideas which it would not otherwise form, though these ideas have scarce ever any resemblance to what occurs in the organs of sense and in the brain, and though there are also very many ideas, which, deriving nothing from any bodily image, cannot without absurdity be referred to the senses.[790] This is perhaps a clearer statement of an important truth than will be found in Malebranche or in Descartes himself.

35. In the second part, Arnauld treats of words and propositions. Much of it may be reckoned more within the province of grammar than of logic. But as it is inconvenient to refer the student to works of a different class, especially if it should be the case that no good grammars, written with a regard to logical principles, were then to be found, this cannot justly be made an objection. In the latter chapters of this second part, he comes to much that is strictly logical, and taken from ordinary books on that science. The third part relates to syllogisms, and notwithstanding the author’s low estimation of that method, in comparison with the general regard for it in the schools, he has not omitted the common explanations of mood and figure, ending with a concise but good account of the chief sophisms.

36. The fourth and last part is entitled, On Method, and contains the principles of connected reasoning, which he justly observes to be more important than the rules of single syllogisms, wherein few make any mistake. The laws of demonstration given by Pascal, are here laid down with some enlargement. Many observations not wholly bearing on merely logical proof, are found in this part of the treatise.

37. The Port-Royal Logic, though not, perhaps, very much read in England, has always been reckoned among the best works in that science, and certainly had a great influence in rendering it more metaphysical, more ethical (for much is said by Arnauld on the moral discipline of the mind in order to fit it for the investigation of truth), more exempt from technical barbarisms and trifling definitions and divisions. It became more and more acknowledged that the rules of syllogism go a very little way in rendering the mind able to follow a course of enquiry without error, much less in assisting it to discover truth; and that even their vaunted prerogative of securing us from fallacy is nearly ineffectual in exercise. The substitution of the French language, in its highest polish, for the uncouth Latinity of the Aristotelians, was another advantage of which the Cartesian school legitimately availed themselves.

Malebranche. 38. Malebranche, whose Recherche de la Vérité was published in 1674, was a warm and almost enthusiastic admirer of Descartes, but his mind was independent, searching, and fond of its own inventions; he acknowledged no master, and in some points dissents from the Cartesian school. His natural temperament was sincere and rigid; he judges the moral and intellectual failings of mankind with a severe scrutiny, and a contemptuousness not generally unjust in itself, but displaying too great confidence in his own superiority. This was enhanced by a religious mysticism, which enters, as an essential element, into his philosophy of the mind. The fame of Malebranche, and still more the popularity in modern times of his Search for Truth, has been affected by that peculiar hypothesis, so mystically expressed, the seeing all things in God, which has been more remembered than any other part of that treatise. “The union,” he says, “of the soul to God is the only means by which we acquire a knowledge of truth. This union has indeed been rendered so obscure by original sin, that few can understand what it means; to those who follow blindly the dictates of sense and passion it appears imaginary. The same cause has so fortified the connection between the soul and body that we look on them as one substance, of which the latter is the principal part. And hence, we may all fear that we do not well discern the confused sounds with which the senses fill the imagination from that pure voice of truth which speaks to the soul. The body speaks louder than God himself; and our pride makes us presumptuous enough to judge without waiting for those words of truth, without which we cannot truly judge at all. And the present work,” he adds, “may give evidence of this; for it is not published as being infallible. But let my readers judge of my opinions according to the clear and distinct answers they shall receive from the only Lord of all men after they shall have interrogated him by paying a serious attention to the subject.” This is a strong evidence of the enthusiastic confidence in supernatural illumination which belongs to Malebranche, and which we are almost surprised to find united with so much cool and acute reasoning as his writings contain.

His style. 39. The Recherche de la Vérité is in six books; the first five on the errors springing from the senses, from the imagination, from the understanding, from the natural inclinations, and from the passions. The sixth contains the method of avoiding these, which, however, has been anticipated in great measure throughout the preceding. Malebranche has many repetitions, but little, I think, that can be called digressive, though he takes a large range of illustration, and dwells rather diffusely on topics of subordinate importance. His style is admirable; clear, precise, elegant, sparing in metaphors, yet not wanting them in due place, warm, and sometimes eloquent, a little redundant, but never passionate or declamatory.

Sketch of his theory. 40. Error, according to Malebranche, is the source of all human misery; man is miserable because he is a sinner, and he would not sin if he did not consent to err. For the will alone judges and reasons, the understanding only perceives things and their relations; a deviation from common language, to say the least, that seems quite unnecessary.[791] The will is active and free; not that we can avoid willing our own happiness; but it possesses a power of turning the understanding towards such objects as please us, and commanding it to examine everything thoroughly, else we should be perpetually deceived, and without remedy, by the appearances of truth. And this liberty we should use on every occasion: it is to become slaves, against the will of God, when we acquiesce in false appearances; but it is in obedience to the voice of eternal truth which speaks within us, that we submit to those secret reproaches of reason, which accompany our refusal to yield to evidence. There are, therefore, two fundamental rules, one for science, the other for morals; never to give an entire consent to any propositions, except those which are so evidently true, that we cannot refuse to admit them without an internal uneasiness and reproach of our reason; and, never fully to love anything, which we can abstain from loving without remorse. We may feel a great inclination to consent absolutely to a probable opinion; yet, on reflection, we shall find that we are not compelled to do so by any tacit self-reproach if we do not. And we ought to consent to such probable opinions for the time until we have more fully examined the question.

41. The sight is the noblest of our senses, and if they had been given us to discover truth, it is through vision that we should have done it. But it deceives us in all it represents, in the size of bodies, their figures and motions, in light and colours. None of these are such as they appear, as he proves by many obvious instances. Thus, we measure the velocity of motion by duration of time and extent of space; but of duration the mind can form no just estimate, and the eye cannot determine equality of spaces. The diameter of the moon is greater by measurement when she is high in the heavens; it appears greater to our eyes in the horizon.[792] On all sides we are beset with error through our senses. Not that the sensations themselves, properly speaking, deceive us. We are not deceived in supposing that we see an orb of light before the sun has risen above the horizon, but in supposing that what we see is the sun itself. Were we even delirious, we should see and feel what our senses present to us, though our judgment as to its reality would be erroneous. And this judgment we may withhold by assenting to nothing without perfect certainty.

42. It would have been impossible for a man endowed with such intrepidity and acuteness as Malebranche to overlook the question, so naturally raised by this sceptical theory, as to the objective existence of an external world. There is no necessary connection, he observes, between the presence of an idea in the soul, and the existence of the thing which it represents, as dreams and delirium prove. Yet we may be confident that extension, figure, and movement, do generally exist without us when we perceive them. These are not imaginary; we are not deceived in believing their reality, though it is very difficult to prove it. But it is far otherwise with colours, smells, or sounds, for these do not exist at all beyond the mind. This he proceeds to show at considerable length.[793] In one of the illustrations subsequently written in order to obviate objections, and subjoined to the Recherche de la Vérité, Malebranche comes again to this problem of the reality of matter, and concludes by subverting every argument in its favour, except what he takes to be the assertion of Scripture. Berkeley, who did not see this in the same light, had scarcely a step to take in his own famous theory, which we may consider as having been anticipated by Malebranche, with the important exception that what was only scepticism and denial of certainty in the one, became a positive and dogmatic affirmation in the other.

43. In all our sensations there are four things distinct in themselves, but which, examined as they arise simultaneously, we are apt to confound; these are the action of the object, the effect upon the organ of sense, the mere sensation, and the judgment we form as to its cause. We fall into errors as to all these, confounding the sensation with the action of bodies, as when we say there is heat in the fire, or colour in the rose, or confounding the motion of the nerves with sensation, as when we refer heat to the hand; but most of all, in drawing mistaken inferences as to the nature of objects from our sensations.[794] It may be here remarked that what Malebranche has properly called the judgment of the mind as to the cause of its sensations, is precisely what Reid denominates perception; a term less clear, and which seems to have led some of his school into important errors. The language of the Scottish philosopher appears to imply that he considered perception as a distinct and original faculty of the mind, rather than what it is, a complex operation of the judgment and memory, applying knowledge already acquired by experience. Neither he, nor his disciple Stewart, though aware of the mistakes that have arisen in this province of metaphysics by selecting our instances from the phenomena of vision instead of the other senses, have avoided the same source of error. The sense of sight has the prerogative of enabling us to pronounce instantly on the external cause of our sensation; and this perception is so intimately blended with the sensation itself, that it has not to our minds, whatever may be the case with young children, the least appearance of a judgment. But we need only make our experiment upon sound or smell, and we shall at once acknowledge that there is no sort of necessary connection between the sensation and our knowledge of its corresponding external object. We hear sounds continually, which we are incapable of referring to any particular body; nor does anyone, I suppose, deny that it is by experience alone we learn to pronounce, with more or less of certainty according to its degree, on the causes from which these sensations proceed.

44. Sensation he defines to be “a modification of the soul in relation to something which passes in the body to which she is united.” These sensations we know by experience; it is idle to go about defining or explaining them; this cannot be done by words. It is an error, according to Malebranche, to believe that all men have like sensations from the same objects. In this he goes farther than Pascal, who thinks it probable that they have, while Malebranche holds it indubitable, from the organs of men being constructed differently, that they do not receive similar impressions; instancing music, some smells and flavours, and many other things of the same kind. But it is obvious to reply that he has argued from the exception to the rule; the great majority of mankind agreeing as to musical sounds (which is the strongest case that can be put against his paradox), and most other sensations. That the sensations of different men, subject to such exceptions, if not strictly alike, are, so to say, in a constant ratio, seems as indisputable as any conclusion we can draw from their testimony.

45. The second book of Malebranche’s treatise relates to the imagination, and the errors connected with it. “The imagination consists in the power of the mind to form images of objects by producing a change in the fibres of that part of the brain, which may be called principal because it corresponds with all parts of the body, and is the place where the soul, if we may so speak, immediately resides.” This he supposes to be where all the filaments of the brain terminate; so difficult was it, especially in that age, for a philosopher, who had the clearest perception of the soul’s immateriality, to free himself from the analogies of extended presence and material impulse. The imagination, he says, comprehends two things; the action of the will and the obedience of the animal spirits which trace images on the brain. The power of conception depends partly upon the strength of those animal spirits, partly on the qualities of the brain itself. For just as the size, the depth, and the clearness of the lines in an engraving depend on the force with which the graver acts, and on the obedience which the copper yields to it, so the depth and clearness of the traces of the imagination depend on the force of the animal spirits, and on the constitution of the fibres of the brain; and it is the difference of these which occasions almost the whole of that vast difference we find in the capacities of men.

46. This arbitrary, though rather specious hypothesis, which, in the present more advanced state of physiology, a philosopher might not in all points reject, but would certainly not assume, is spread out by Malebranche over a large part of his work, and especially the second book. The delicacy of the fibres of the brain, he supposes, is one of the chief causes of our not giving sufficient application to difficult subjects. Women possess this delicacy, and hence have more intelligence than men as to all sensible objects; but whatever is abstract is to them incomprehensible. The fibres are soft in children, and become stronger with age, the greatest perfection of the understanding being between thirty and fifty; but with prejudiced men, and especially when they are advanced in life, the hardness of the cerebral fibre confirms them in error. For we can understand nothing without attention, nor attend to it without having a strong image in the brain, nor can that image be formed without a suppleness and susceptibility of motion in the brain itself. It is, therefore, highly useful to get the habit of thinking on all subjects, and thus to give the brain a facility of motion analogous to that of the fingers in playing on a musical instrument. And this habit is best acquired by seeking truth in difficult things while we are young, because it is then that the fibres are most easily bent in all directions.[795]

47. This hypothesis, carried so far as it has been by Malebranche, goes very great lengths in asserting not merely a connection between the cerebral motions and the operations of the mind, but something like a subordination of the latter to a plastic power in the animal spirits of the brain. For if the differences in the intellectual powers of mankind, and also, as he afterwards maintains, in their moral emotions, are to be accounted for by mere bodily configuration as their regulating cause, little more than a naked individuality of consciousness seems to be left to the immaterial principle. No one, however, whether he were staggered by this difficulty or not, had a more decided conviction of the essential distinction between mind and matter than this disciple of Descartes. The soul, he says, does not become body, nor the body soul, by their union. Each substance remains as it is, the soul incapable of extension and motion, the body incapable of thought and desire. All the alliance between soul and body, which is known to us, consists in a natural and mutual correspondence of the thoughts of the former with the traces on the brain, and of its emotions with the traces of the animal spirits. As soon as the soul receives new ideas, new traces are imprinted on the brain; and as soon as external objects imprint new traces, the soul receives new ideas. Not that it contemplates these traces, for it has no knowledge of them; nor that the traces contain the ideas, since they have no relation to them; nor that the soul receives her ideas from the traces, for it is inconceivable that the soul should receive anything from the body, and become more enlightened, as some philosophers (meaning Gassendi) express it, by turning itself towards the phantasms in the brain. Thus, also, when the soul wills that the arm should move, the arm moves, though she does not even know what else is necessary for its motion; and thus, when the animal spirits are put into movement, the soul is disturbed, though she does not even know that there are animal spirits in the body.

48. These remarks of Malebranche it is important to familiarise to our minds; and those who reflect upon them will neither fall into the gross materialism to which many physiologists appear prone, nor, on the other hand, out of fear of allowing too much to the bodily organs, reject any sufficient proof that may be adduced for the relation between the cerebral system and the intellectual processes. These opposite errors are by no means uncommon in the present age. But, without expressing an opinion on that peculiar hypothesis which is generally called phrenology, we might ask whether it is not quite as conceivable that a certain state of portions of the brain may be the antecedent condition of memory or imagination, as that a certain state of nervous filaments may be, what we know it is, an invariable antecedent of sensation. In neither instance can there be any resemblance or proper representation of the organic motion transferred to the soul; nor ought we to employ, even in metaphor, the analogies of impulse or communication. But we have two phenomena, between which, by the constitution of our human nature, and probably by that of the very lowest animals, there is a perpetual harmony and concomitance; an ultimate fact, according to the present state of our faculties, which may, in some senses, be called mysterious, inasmuch as we can neither fully apprehend its final causes, nor all the conditions of its operation, but one which seems not to involve any appearance of contradiction, and should therefore not lead us into the useless perplexity of seeking a solution that is almost evidently beyond our reach.

49. The association of ideas is far more extensively developed by Malebranche in this second book than by any of the old writers, not even, I think, with the exception of Hobbes; though he is too fond of mixing the psychological facts which experience furnishes with his precarious, however plausible, theory of cerebral traces. Many of his remarks are acute and valuable. Thus, he observes that writers who make use of many new terms in science, under the notion of being more intelligible, are often not understood at all, whatever care they may take to define their words. We grant in theory their right to do this; but nature resists. The new words, having no ideas previously associated with them, fall out of the reader’s mind, except in mathematics, where they can be rendered evident by diagrams. In all this part, Malebranche expatiates on the excessive deference shown to authority, which, because it is great in religion, we suppose equally conclusive in philosophy, and on the waste of time which mere reading of many books entails; experience, he says, having always shown that those who have studied most are the very persons who have led the world into the greatest errors. The whole of the chapters on this subject is worth perusal.

50. In another part of this second book, Malebranche has opened a new and fertile vein, which he is far from having exhausted, on what he calls the contagiousness of a powerful imagination. Minds of this character, he observes, rule those which are feebler in conception: they give them by degrees their own habit, they impress their own type; and as men of strong imagination are themselves for the most part very unreasonable, their brains being cut up, as it were, by deep traces, which leave no room for anything else, no source of human error is more dangerous than this contagiousness of their disorder. This he explains, in his favourite physiology, by a certain natural sympathy between the cerebral fibres of different men, which being wanting in anyone with whom we converse, it is vain to expect that he will enter into our views, and we must look for a more sympathetic tissue elsewhere.

51. The moral observations of Malebranche are worth more than these hypotheses with which they are mingled. Men of powerful imagination express themselves with force and vivacity, though not always in the most natural manner, and often with great animation of gesture; they deal with subjects that excite sensible images, and from all this they acquire a great power of persuasion. This is exercised especially over persons in subordinate relations; and thus children, servants, or courtiers adopt the opinions of their superiors. Even in religion, nations have been found to take up the doctrines of their rulers, as has been seen in England. In certain authors, who influence our minds without any weight of argument, this despotism of a strong imagination is exercised, which he particularly illustrates by the examples of Tertullian, Seneca, and Montaigne. The contagious power of imagination is also manifest in the credulity of mankind as to apparitions and witchcraft; and he observes that where witches are burned, there is generally a great number of them, while, since some parliaments have ceased to punish for sorcery, the offence has diminished within their jurisdiction.

52. The application which these striking and original views will bear, spreads far into the regions of moral philosophy, in the largest sense of that word. It is needless to dwell upon, and idle to cavil at the physiological theories to which Malebranche has had recourse. False let them be, what is derived from the experience of human nature will always be true. No one general phenomenon in the intercommunity of mankind with each other is more worthy to be remembered, or more evident to an observing eye, than this contagiousness, as Malebranche phrases it, of a powerful imagination, especially when assisted by any circumstances that secure and augment its influence. The history of every popular delusion, and even the petty events of every day in private life, are witnesses to its power.

53. The third book is entitled, Of the Understanding or Pure Spirit (l’Esprit Pur). By the pure understanding he means the faculty of the soul to know the reality of certain things without the aid of images in the brain. And he warns the reader that the inquiry will be found dry and obscure. The essence of the soul, he says, following his Cartesian theory, consists in thinking, as that of matter does in extension; will, imagination, memory, and the like, are modifications of thought or forms of the soul, as water, wood, or fire are modifications of matter. This sort of expression has been adopted by our metaphysicians of the Scots school in preference to the ideas of reflection, as these operations are called by Locke. But by the word thought (pensée) he does not mean these modifications, but the soul or thinking principle absolutely, capable of all these modifications, as extension is neither round nor square, though capable of either form. The power of volition, and, by parity of reasoning we may add, of thinking, is inseparable from the soul, but not the acts of volition or thinking themselves; as a body is always movable though it be not always in motion.

54. In this book it does not seem that Malebranche has been very successful in distinguishing the ideas of pure intellect from those which the senses or imagination present to us; nor do we clearly see what he means by the former, except those of existence and a few more. But he now hastens to his peculiar hypothesis as to the mode of perception. By ideas he understands the immediate object of the soul, which all the world, he supposes, will agree not to be the same with the external object of sense. Ideas are real existences; for they have properties, and represent very different things; but nothing can have no property. How then do they enter into the mind, or become present to it? Is it, as the Aristotelians hold, by means of species transmitted from the external objects? Or are they produced instantaneously by some faculty of the soul? Or have they been created and posited, as it were, in the soul, when it began to exist? Or does God produce them in us whenever we think or perceive? Or does the soul contain in herself in some transcendent manner whatever is in the sensible world? These hypotheses of elder philosophers, some of which are not quite intelligibly distinct from each other, Malebranche having successively refuted, comes to what he considers the only possible alternative—namely, that the soul is united to an all-perfect Being, in whom all that belongs to his creatures is contained. Besides the exclusion of every other supposition which, by his sorites he conceives himself to have given, he subjoins several direct arguments in favour of his own theory, but in general so obscure and full of arbitrary assumption that they cannot be stated in this brief sketch.[796]

55. The mysticism of this eminent man displays itself throughout this part of his treatise, but rarely leading him into that figurative and unmeaning language from which the inferior class of enthusiasts are never free. His philosophy which has hitherto appeared so sceptical, assumes now the character of intense irresistible conviction. The scepticism of Malebranche is merely ancillary to his mysticism. His philosophy, if we may use so quaint a description of it, is subjectivity leading objectivity in chains. He seems to triumph in his restoration of the inner man to his pristine greatness, by subduing those false traitors and rebels, the nerves and brain, to whom, since the great lapse of Adam, his posterity had been in thrall. It has been justly remarked by Brown, that in the writings of Malebranche, as in all theological metaphysicians of the catholic church, we perceive the commanding influence of Augustin.[797] From him, rather than, in the first instance, from Plato or Plotinus, it may be suspected that Malebranche, who was not very learned in ancient philosophy, derived the manifest tinge of Platonism that, mingling with his warm admiration of Descartes, has rendered him a link between two famous systems, not very harmonious in their spirit and turn of reasoning. But his genius more clear, or at least disciplined in a more accurate logic than that of Augustin, taught him to dissent from that father by denying objective reality to eternal truths, such as that two and two are equal to four; descending thus one step from unintelligible mysticism.

56. “Let us repose,” he concludes, “in this tenet, that God is the intelligible world, or the place of spirits, like as the material world is the place of bodies; that it is from his power they receive all their modifications; that it is in his wisdom they find all their ideas; and that it is by his love they feel all their well-regulated emotions. And since his power and his wisdom and his love are but himself, let us believe with St. Paul, that he is not far from each of us, and that in him we live and move, and have our being.” But sometimes Malebranche does not content himself with these fine effusions of piety. His theism, as has often been the case with mystical writers, expands till it becomes as it were dark with excessive light, and almost vanishes in his own effulgence. He has passages that approach very closely to the pantheism of Jordano Bruno and Spinosa; one especially, wherein he vindicates the Cartesian argument for a being of necessary existence in a strain which perhaps renders that argument less incomprehensible, but certainly cannot be said, in any legitimate sense, to establish the existence of a Deity.[798]

57. It is from the effect which the invention of so original and striking an hypothesis, and one that raises such magnificent conceptions of the union between the Deity and the human soul, would produce on a man of an elevated and contemplative genius, that we must account for Malebranche’s forgetfulness of much that he has judiciously said in part of his treatise, on the limitation of our faculties and the imperfect knowledge we can attain as to our intellectual nature. For, if we should admit that ideas are substances, and not accidents of the thinking spirit, it would still be doubtful whether he has wholly enumerated, or conclusively refuted, the possible hypotheses as to their existence in the mind. And his more direct reasonings labour under the same difficulty from the manifest incapacity of our understandings to do more than form conjectures and dim notions of what we can so imperfectly bring before them.

58. The fourth and fifth books of the Recherche de la Vérité treat of the natural inclinations and passions, and of the errors which spring from those sources. These books are various and discursive, and very characteristic of the author’s mind; abounding with a mystical theology, which extends to an absolute negation of secondary causes, as well as with poignant satire on the follies of mankind. In every part of his treatise, but especially in these books, Malebranche pursues with unsparing ridicule two classes, the men of learning, and the men of the world. With Aristotle and the whole school of his disciples he has an inveterate quarrel, and omits no occasion of holding them forth to contempt. This seems to have been in a great measure warranted by their dogmatism, their bigotry, their pertinacious resistance to modern science, especially to the Cartesian philosophy, which Malebranche in general followed. “Let them,” he exclaims, “prove, if they can, that Aristotle, or any of themselves, has deduced one truth in physical philosophy from any principle peculiar to himself, and we will promise never to speak of him but in eulogy.”[799] But, until this gauntlet should be taken up, he thought himself at liberty to use very different language. “The works of the Stagyrite,” he observes, “are so obscure and full of indefinite words, that we have a colour for ascribing to him the most opposite opinions. In fact, we make him say what we please, because he says very little, though with much parade; just as children fancy bells to say anything, because they make a great noise, and in reality say nothing at all.”

59. But such philosophers are not the only class of the learned he depreciates. Those who pass their time in gazing through telescopes, and distribute provinces in the moon to their friends, those who pore over worthless books, such as the Rabbinical and other Oriental writers, or compose folio volumes on the animals mentioned in Scripture, while they can hardly tell what are found in their own province, those who accumulate quotations to inform us not of truth, but of what other men have taken for truth, are exposed to his sharp, but doubtless exaggerated and unreasonable ridicule. Malebranche, like many men of genius, was much too intolerant of what might give pleasure to other men, and too narrow in his measure of utility. He seems to think little valuable in human learning but metaphysics and algebra.[800] From the learned he passes to the great, and after enumerating the circumstances which obstruct their perception of truth, comes to the blunt conclusion that men “much raised above the rest by rank, dignity, or wealth, or whose minds are occupied in gaining these advantages, are remarkably subject to error, and hardly capable of discerning any truths which lie a little out of the common way.”[801]

La plupart des livres de certains savans ne sont fabriqués qu’à coups de dictionnaires, et ils n’ont guères lû que les tables des livres qu’ils citent, ou quelques lieux communs, ramassés de différens auteurs. On n’oseroit entrer d’avantage dans le détail de ces choses, ni en donner des exemples, de peur de choquer des personnes aussi fières et aussi bilieuses que sont ces faux savans; car on ne prend pas plaisir à se faire injurier en Grec et en Arabe.

60. The sixth and last book announces a method of directing our pursuit of truth, by which we may avoid the many errors to which our understandings are liable. It promises to give them all the perfection of which our nature is capable, by prescribing the rules we should invariably observe. But it must, I think, be confessed that there is less originality in this method than we might expect. We find, however, many acute and useful, if not always novel, observations on the conduct of the understanding, and it may be reckoned among the books which would supply materials for what is still wanting to philosophical literature, an ample and useful logic. We are so frequently inattentive, he observes, especially to the pure ideas of the understanding, that all resources should be employed to fix our thoughts. And for this purpose we may make use of the passions, the senses, or the imagination, but the second with less danger than the first, and the third than the second. Geometrical figures he ranges under the aids supplied to the imagination rather than to the senses. He dwells much at length on the utility of geometry in fixing our attention, and of algebra in compressing and arranging our thoughts. All sciences, he well remarks, and I do not know that it had been said before, which treat of things distinguishable by more or less in quantity, and which consequently may be represented by extension, are capable of illustration by diagrams. But these, he conceives, are inapplicable to moral truths, though sure consequences may be derived from them. Algebra, however, is far more useful in improving the understanding than geometry, and is in fact, with its sister arithmetic, the best means that we possess.[802] But as men like better to exercise the imagination than the pure intellect, geometry is the more favourite study of the two.

Cudworth has a somewhat similar remark in his Immutable Morality, that the cogitations we have of corporeal things are usually, in his technical style, both noematical and phantasmatical together, the one being as it were the soul, and the other the body of them. “Whenever we think of a phantasmatical universal or universalised phantasm, or a thing which we have no clear intellection of (as for example of the nature of a rose in general), there is a complication of something noematical and something phantasmatical together; for phantasms themselves as well as sensations are always individual things.” P. 143.

Character of Malebranche. 61. Malebranche may perhaps be thought to have occupied too much of our attention at the expense of more popular writers. But for this very reason, that the Recherche de la Vérité is not at present much read, I have dwelt long on a treatise of so great celebrity in its own age, and which, even more perhaps than the metaphysical writings of Descartes, has influenced that department of philosophy. Malebranche never loses sight of the great principle of the soul’s immateriality, even in his long and rather hypothetical disquisitions on the instrumentality of the brain in acts of thought; and his language is far less objectionable on this subject than that of succeeding philosophers. He is always consistent and clear in distinguishing the soul itself from its modifications and properties. He knew well and had deeply considered the application of mathematical and physical science to the philosophy of the human mind. He is very copious and diligent in illustration, and very clear in definition. His principal errors, and the sources of them in his peculiar temperament, have appeared in the course of these pages. And to these we may add his maintaining some Cartesian paradoxes, such as the system of vortices, and the want of sensation in brutes. The latter he deduced from the immateriality of a thinking principle, supposing it incredible, though he owns it had been the tenet of Augustin, that there could be an immaterial spirit in the lower animals, and also from the incompatibility of any unmerited suffering with the justice of God.[803] Nor was Malebranche exempt from some prejudices of scholastic theology; and though he generally took care to avoid its technical language, is content to repel the objection to his denial of all secondary causation from its making God the sole author of sin, by saying that sin being a privation of righteousness, is negative, and consequently requires no cause.

Compared with Pascal. 62. Malebranche bears a striking resemblance to his great contemporary Pascal, though they were not, I believe, in any personal relation to each other, nor could either have availed himself of the other’s writings. Both of ardent minds, endowed with strong imagination and lively wit, sarcastic, severe, fearless, disdainful of popular opinion and accredited reputations; both imbued with the notion of a vast difference between the original and actual state of man, and thus solving many phenomena of his being; both, in different modes and degrees, sceptical, and rigorous in the exaction of proof; both undervaluing all human knowledge beyond the regions of mathematics; both of rigid strictness in morals, and a fervid enthusiastic piety. But in Malebranche there is a less overpowering sense of religion; his eye roams unblenched in the light, before which that of Pascal had been veiled in awe; he is sustained by a less timid desire of truth, by greater confidence in the inspirations that are breathed into his mind; he is more quick in adopting a novel opinion, but less apt to embrace a sophism in defence of an old one; he has less energy, but more copiousness and variety.

Arnauld on true and false ideas. 63. Arnauld, who, though at first in personal friendship with Malebranche, held no friendship in a balance with his rigid love of truth, combated the chief points of the other’s theory in a treatise on true and false ideas. This work I have never had the good fortune to see; it appears to assail a leading principle of Malebranche, the separate existence of ideas, as objects in the mind independent and distinguishable from the sensation itself. Arnauld maintained, as Reid and others have since done, that we do not perceive or feel ideas, but real objects, and thus led the way to a school which has been called that of Scotland, and has had a great popularity among our later metaphysicians. It would require a critical examination of his work, which I have not been able to make, to determine precisely what were the opinions of this philosopher.[804]

64. The peculiar hypothesis of Malebranche, that we see all things in God, was examined by Locke in a short piece, contained in the collection of his works. It will readily be conceived that two philosophers, one eminently mystical and endeavouring upon this highly transcendental theme to grasp in his mind and express in his language something beyond the faculties of man, the other as characteristically averse to mystery, and slow to admit any thing without proof, would have hardly any common ground even to fight upon. Locke, therefore, does little else than complain that he cannot understand what Malebranche has advanced; and most of his readers will probably find themselves in the same position.

Norris. 65. He had, however, an English supporter of some celebrity in his own age, Norris; a disciple, and one of the latest we have had, of the Platonic school of Henry More. The principal metaphysical treatise of Norris, his Essay on the Ideal World, was published in two parts, 1701 and 1702. It does not therefore come within our limits. Norris is more thoroughly Platonic than Malebranche, to whom, however, he pays great deference, and adopts his fundamental hypothesis on seeing all things in God. He is a writer of fine genius, and a noble elevation of moral sentiments, such as predisposes men for the Platonic schemes of theosophy. He looked up to Augustin with as much veneration as to Plato, and respected more, perhaps, than Malebranche, certainly more than the generality of English writers, the theological metaphysicians of the schools. With these he mingled some visions of a later mysticism. But his reasonings will seldom bear a close scrutiny.

Pascal. 66. In the Thoughts of Pascal we find many striking remarks on the logic of that science with which he was peculiarly conversant, and upon the general foundations of certainty. He had reflected deeply upon the sceptical objections to all human reasoning, and, though sometimes out of a desire to elevate religious faith at its expense, he seems to consider them unanswerable, he was too clear-headed to believe them just. “Reason,” he says, “confounds the dogmatists, and nature the sceptics.”[805] “We have an incapacity of demonstration, which one cannot overcome; we have a conception of truth which the others cannot disturb.”[806] He throws out a notion of a more complete method of reasoning than that of geometry, wherein everything shall be demonstrated, which, however, he holds to be unattainable;[807] and perhaps on this account he might think the cavils of pyrrhonism invincible by pure reason. But as he afterwards admits that we may have a full certainty of propositions that cannot be demonstrated, such as the infinity of number and space, and that such incapability of direct proof is rather a perfection than a defect, this notion of a greater completeness in evidence seems neither clear nor consistent.[808]

67. Geometry, Pascal observes, is almost the only subject, as to which we find truths wherein all men agree. And one cause of this is that geometers alone regard the true laws of demonstration. These as enumerated by him are eight in number. 1. To define nothing which cannot be expressed in clearer terms than those in which it is already expressed. 2. To leave no obscure or equivocal terms undefined. 3. To employ in the definition no terms not already known. 4. To omit nothing in the principles from which we argue unless we are sure it is granted. 5. To lay down no axiom which is not perfectly evident. 6. To demonstrate nothing which is as clear already as we can make it. 7. To prove everything in the least doubtful, by means of self-evident axioms, or of propositions already demonstrated. 8. To substitute mentally the definition instead of the thing defined. Of these rules, he says, the first, fourth, and sixth are not absolutely necessary in order to avoid error, but the other five are indispensable. Yet, though they may be found in books of logic, none but the geometers have paid any regard to them. The authors of these books seem not to have entered into the spirit of their own precepts. All other rules than those he has given are useless or mischievous; they contain, he says, the whole art of demonstration.[809]

68. The reverence of Pascal, like that of Malebranche, for what is established in religion does not extend to philosophy. We do not find in them, as we may sometimes perceive in the present day, all sorts of prejudices against the liberties of the human mind clustering together, like a herd of bats, by an instinctive association. He has the same idea as Bacon, that the ancients were properly the children among mankind. Not only each man, he says, advances daily in science, but all men collectively make a constant progress, so that all generations of mankind during so many ages may be considered as one man, always subsisting and always learning; and the old age of this universal man is not to be sought in the period next to his birth, but in that which is most removed from it. Those we call ancients were truly novices in all things; and we who have added to all they knew the experience of so many succeeding ages, have a better claim to that antiquity which we revere in them. In this, with much ingenuity and much truth, there is a certain mixture of fallacy, which I shall not wait to point out.

69. The genius of Pascal was admirably fitted for acute observation on the constitution of human nature, if he had not seen everything through a refracting medium of religious prejudice. When this does not interfere to bias his judgment, he abounds with fine remarks, though always a little tending towards severity. One of the most useful and original is the following: “When we would show anyone that he is mistaken, our best course is to observe on what side he considers the subject, for his view of it is generally right on this side, and admit to him that he is right so far. He will be satisfied with this acknowledgment that he was not wrong in his judgment, but only inadvertent in not looking at the whole of the case. For we are less ashamed of not having seen the whole, than of being deceived in what we do see; and this may perhaps arise from an impossibility of the understanding’s being deceived in what it does see, just as the perceptions of the senses, as such, must be always true.”[810]

Spinosa’s ethics. 70. The Cartesian philosophy has been supposed to have produced a metaphysician very divergent in most of his theory from that school, Benedict Spinosa. No treatise is written in a more rigidly geometrical method than his Ethics. It rests on definitions and axioms, from which the propositions are derived in close, brief, and usually perspicuous demonstrations. The few explanations he has thought necessary are contained in scholia. Thus a fabric is erected, astonishing and bewildering in its entire effect, yet so regularly constructed, that the reader must pause and return on his steps to discover an error in the workmanship, while he cannot also but acknowledge the good faith and intimate persuasion of having attained the truth, which the acute and deep-reflecting author everywhere displays.

Its general originality. 71. Spinosa was born in 1632; we find by his correspondence with Oldenburg, in 1661, that he had already developed his entire scheme, and in that with De Vries in 1663, the propositions of the Ethics are alluded to numerically, as we now read them.[811] It was therefore the fruit of early meditation, at its fearlessness, its general disregard of the slow process of observation, its unhesitating dogmatism, might lead us to expect. In what degree he had availed himself of prior writers is not evident; with Descartes and Lord Bacon he was familiar, and from the former he had derived some leading tenets; but he observes both in him and Bacon what he calls mistakes as to the first cause and origin of things, their ignorance of the real nature of the human mind, and of the true sources of error.[812] The pantheistic theory of Jordano Bruno is not very remote from that of Spinosa; but the rhapsodies of the Italian, who seldom aims at proof, can hardly have supplied much to the subtle mind of the Jew of Amsterdam. Buhle has given us an exposition of the Spinosistic theory.[813] But several propositions in this I do not find in the author, and Buhle has at least, without any necessity, entirely deviated from the arrangement he found in the Ethics. This seems as unreasonable in a work so rigorously systematic, as it would be in the elements of Euclid; and I believe the following pages will prove more faithful to the text. But it is no easy task to translate and abridge a writer of such extraordinary conciseness as well as subtlety; nor is it probable that my attempt will be intelligible to those who have not habituated themselves to metaphysical inquiry.

View of his metaphysical theory. 72. The first book or part of the Ethics is entitled, Concerning God, and contains the entire theory of Spinosa. It may even be said that this is found in a few of the first propositions; which being granted, the rest could not easily be denied; presenting, as it does, little more than new aspects of the former, or evident deductions from them. Upon eight definitions and seven axioms reposes this philosophical superstructure. A substance, by the third definition, is that, the conception of which does not require the conception of anything else as antecedent to it.[814] The attribute of a substance is whatever the mind perceives to constitute its essence.[815] The mode of a substance is its accident or affection, by means of which it is conceived.[816] In the sixth definition he says: I understand by the name of God a being absolutely infinite; that is, a substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses an eternal and infinite essence. Whatever expresses an essence, and involves no contradiction, may be predicated of an absolutely infinite being.[817] The most important of the axioms are the following: From a given determinate cause the effect necessarily follows; but if there be no determinate cause, no effect can follow.—The knowledge of an effect depends upon the knowledge of the cause, and includes it.—Things that have nothing in common with each other cannot be understood by means of each other; that is, the conception of one does not include that of the other.—A true idea must agree with its object.[818]

73. Spinosa proceeds to his demonstrations upon the basis of these assumptions alone. Two substances, having different attributes, have nothing in common with each other; and hence one cannot be the cause of the other, since one may be conceived without involving the conception of the other; but an effect cannot be conceived without involving the knowledge of the cause.[819] It seems to be in this fourth axiom, and in the proposition grounded upon it, that the fundamental fallacy lurks. The relation between a cause and effect is surely something different from our perfect comprehension of it, or indeed from our having any knowledge of it at all; much less can the contrary assertion be deemed axiomatic. But if we should concede this postulate, it might perhaps be very difficult to resist the subsequent proofs, so ingeniously and with such geometrical rigour are they arranged.

74. Two or more things cannot be distinguished, except by the diversity of their attributes, or by that of their modes. For there is nothing out of ourselves except substances and their modes. But there cannot be two substances of the same attribute, since there would be no means of distinguishing them except their modes or affections; and every substance, being prior in order of time to its modes, may be considered independently of them; hence, two such substances could not be distinguished at all. One substance therefore cannot be the cause of another; for they cannot have the same attribute, that is, anything in common with one another.[820] Every substance therefore is self-caused; that is, its essence implies its existence.[821] It is also necessarily infinite, for it would otherwise be terminated by some other of the same nature and necessarily existing; but two substances cannot have the same attribute, and therefore cannot both possess necessary existence.[822] The more reality or existence any being possesses, the more attributes are to be ascribed to it. This he says appears by the definition of an attribute.[823] The proof however, is surely not manifest, nor do we clearly apprehend what he meant by degrees of reality or existence. But of this theorem he was very proud. I look upon the demonstration, he says in a letter, as capital (palmariam) that the more attributes we ascribe to any being, the more we are compelled to acknowledge its existence; that is, the more we conceive it as true and not a mere chimera.[824] And from this he derived the real existence of God, though the former proof seems collateral to it. God, or a substance consisting of infinite attributes, each expressing an eternal and infinite power, necessarily exists.[825] For such an essence involves existence. And, besides this, if anything does not exist, a cause must be given for its non-existence, since this requires one as much as existence itself.[826] The cause may be either in the nature of the thing, as, e. gr. a square circle cannot exist by the circle’s nature, or in something extrinsic. But neither of these can prevent the existence of God. The later propositions in Spinosa are chiefly obvious corollaries from the definitions and a few of the first propositions which contain the whole theory, which he proceeds to expand.